The Papers of Marion Parks, a talented and resourceful
personality in Los Angeles during the early 1900s, relate to the history of Southern California.
Parks described herself as “a California historian.” Her principal contributions
in this capacity were a series of still-useful booklets published while she was a publicity writer
for Security-First National Bank, and the organization of colorful historical pageants (in the
Spanish style) in several California towns. Her local history files contain typescripts of her
own writings as well as quantities of vintage pamphlets and brochures, mostly from the 1930s.
Correspondence files date from about the 1920s to the 1940s. The collection also includes 197 photographs taken by Marion Parks of parades, historical pageants, and other events in and around Los Angeles that were probably taken in the 1920s and early 1930s.